Tainan

Tainan used to be a sleepy town in the southern part of Taiwan best known for its many temples. It is now a bustling city, fourth largest in Taiwan.

One of the great things about this program is that there are 47 of us scattered all over the island so there is usually a friendly face to spend a weekend with and to serve as host and tour guide. In thins case, it was a lovely woman from Indiana who, I have decided, has the best deal of any of us.

In addition to just being bigger, Tainan has 3 large universities with all the cultural opportunities that implies. She is out several nights a week at concerts, plays, ballets, etc. (I am home watching the rice ripen).

In addition to all the culture, there is a beach 30 minutes away, there is a train station AND an airport. This is without mentioning all of the interesting English speaking residents and the numerous wonderful restaurants. We went out for Greek food, for heaven's sake!

Just to make the jealousy total, we were comparing our teaching experiences. Here I am still trying to teach the kids their English names and she is reading "Dracula" with her 6th graders! Oh, it was hard.

We had a super weekend, though, mostly just walking around the city seeing the sights and eating whenever possible. I think the weather is even better there, it was great for being outside and they have wonderful wide sidewalks to make it a walkers delight. We even found two Halloween stores and a grocery store that sold Heinz ketchup and strawberry Twizzlers! I sweat the place was like coming home from camp.

I don't know whether or not I want to stay here another year, but if I do, it will only be with the promise of being in Tainan.



The temples are all still there, most impressive is the oldest Confucian temple which is very nice and tranquil. Some of the temples are so small they are barely the size of a doorway but very ornamental.

Class Trip to Kenting National Park

I was pleased to be invited to go along on the 9th grade class trip to Kenting -- a national park covering the southern tip of Taiwan. It is commonly referred to as the "Hawaii of Taiwan" and with pretty good reason.

Here we all were -- 7 buses trekking out at 7:00 AM. It has been awhile since I have been a chaperone and times have certainly changed. I was prepared (a whip and a chair) but they had hired a company to run this operation and they were great. Two of them on every bus keeping the kids busy and happy, they had arranged everything and it was all great and so organized! I had gone so far as to teach them "100 bottles of beer on the wall" but there was never a time they were antsy.

We stopped at the National Aquarium which is really beautiful but a little funny. In many of the big exhibits, after the explanations, there would be a huge "window" which I thought was looking into a tank but was actually a video screen! It was well done though and they do have many live fish and a large collection of penguins.

Then we stopped for lunch and they came and gathered up the teachers and took us to a separate room to eat -- none of this settling of food fights.Then we went to two scenic stops (many pictures taken)and watched the sun set. Then on to a restaurant for wonderful barbecue and singing and dancing and the inevitable Karaoke. Enough of that, on to the night market for an hour. Then to our hotel which was very nice. It was described as "5 star" but I would say that was a relative term. It was clearly set up for big groups as there were 4 beds in each room. All the kids knew who was bunking with whom and went down well.

I don't know if they did bed checks and if anyone patrolled the halls like I expected to do, but the teachers didn't.

In the morning there was a nice breakfast buffet and the kids went down to play beachball dodge ball on the black sand beach -- really nice. Checked out smoothly, back on the bus for an hour and went to this place which is hard to describe. It was clearly set up for school groups as they had a bunch of activities that the kids rotated though: fishing, a boat ride, a visit to an oyster farm and maybe some other stuff that we didn't do. It took a while to run 280 9th graders through the course then back on the bus and home by 5.

All in all a pleasant couple of days and the kids loved it. The only drawback for me was that there is diving there and I once asked if I would be able to go. They said no, that there would not be time to separate me from the "group activities" and that the kids would not even be going swimming, hence, no swim suit or anything. While we were driving down on the first day, the driver turned to me and asked when I wanted to go scuba diving!

Kenting is very lovely. It was a little hard to see things through the mass of kids in various uniforms (it seemed like it was the week for all 9th graders on the island. I was so glad that they wore their uniforms, or we never would have found them). It is very lush and green with lots of palm trees making that great noise that they make, and gorgeous flowers. I plan to go back.

Food

I guess it's time to talk about food since so many of you ask about it.

My big meal of the day comes at school at lunchtime. Not bad, for school cafeteria food, and if it is especially good, there are bags available to take some home.

I could easily live on Chinese food but periodically get a craving for some "comfort food". So far, I have located Combos, peanut butter, Pringles, Oreos, Diet Coke, hot dogs, outstanding tomatoes are now in season and the tangerines I remember from my last stay here.

Chinese are big snackers and there is a world of crackers and chips but you have to be careful since they are often oddly flavored: barbecus chicken potato chips, seafood platter Doritos, and a saltine looking cracker that is fish flavored (found that out the hard way!).

What I find really annoying is the dififculty in finding bread products that don't have something hidden them. For, example, I found things that looked like dinner rolls with which I thought I could make ham and cheese sandwiches. Beautiful and fresh, I was so pleased until I cut one in half and found plum paste in it. Often what is inside is not bad, it is the surprise factor that gets to me.

Fruit and vegetables are wonderful, though not as cheap as I remember. I bought 3 nice tomatoes yesterday for about $1.50 - not so different from what I would pay at Giant. Restaurant food is also not cheap unless you stick to rice or noodles. Of course, since there are no restaurants in my town, good eating out only happens on weekends. When we were in Natou over the long weekend, we did have two great dinners. They both had a salad bar, which I hadn't seen here yet and really pigged out. Three plates of lettuce doesn't leave much room for anything else but who cares!

There is now also ice cream and ice cream products eveywhere which is a treat. Before they told us to avoid them because of the fear of Tuberculosis.

Another interesting product is fruit flavored milk. I have never been much of a milk drinker so I haven't gotten into this but there seems to be a major effort to get people to drink more milk so they have flavored it with all sorts of juices (apple milk?) Could this be why kids are so much bigger?

Long Weekend

Last Friday, October 6 was celebrated as Mid-Autumn Festival. This is a really old traditional holiday which involves staring at the harvest moon and barbequing. Not a whole lot different from Thanksgiving. This year it was on a Friday so we had a 3 day weekend, then the following Tuesday was 10/10 - Chinese National Day.

At the very last minute, for any one of many rumored reasons, they decided to make Monday a holiday also to give everyone a 5-day weekend. Of course, it isn't free, we have to have school tomorrow (Saturday) to pay it back. It was also decided too late to do anything fun. If I had known I was going to have 5 days, I might have gone to Japan or somewhere.

Anyway, three of us went to Sun Moon Lake, oft billed as the most beautiful place in Taiwan. It was too late to get hotel rooms at the lake so we stayed in a nearby town. Well, pretty nearby. The weekend was one of those "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" weekends. Anyway, to make a long story short, the lake area is gogeous but not at its best because of haze. We took a boat trip around it and that was fun.

The next day we met up with a woman from my school and what was a sort of unplanned (or misunderstood?) day trip to two earthquake museums. In 1999 there was a 7.3 earthquake in Taiwan, epicentered near the lake. They have done a fascinating job of showing the effects. It was really quite interesting if not exactly what I expected.

We spent the next day back in Douliou shopping, then home to a day of rest. Not bad for an unplanned weekend.

Today is the following Saturday and we had a regular school day. Tomorrow I am going to climb a mountain -- at least I think I am, I'm doing it with the same person who I thought was taking me to sweep her family graves but instead orchestrated the earthquake exhibit tour, so who knows what tomroow will bring?

Teacher's Day

I am taking advantage of the availability of the blog site. Don't let me bore you.

September 28 was Confucius' Birthday and the day is celebrated as Teacher's Day. I am told that once it was a national holiday but no longer. It's not a bad deal, though. The Parents' Association gave us a really wonderful banquet -- best food I've had since I got here and the school sponsored a day trip to the north on the following Saturday. It was originally billed as a visit to a Hakka Village (one of Taiwan's minority groups) but we didn't really get to one.

Two buses were full. They let me bring another teacher friend along since the others were allowed to bring their families. We drove north about 2 hours, up into the mountains where it was lovely. We stopped at a giant Buddha statue on the way. We got to this national park area and hiked around in the rainforest. We saw a movie about the area which showed a lot of aborigines but we never saw any. We had a great lunch, then went to a Hakka town. I never saw any Hakkas but they proudly showed us two houses that were over 100 years old! (I didn't want to say anything about Old Town Alexandria so kept my mouth shut.) We couldn't go inside the houses but the layout of the traditional Chinese house was described.

In the town center, we were treated to a bunch of different stores that sold different flavors of tea as this is a tea growing region. Then we went to another town that had interesting handicrafts -- though pretty expensive.

Another great meal and we came home. All in all a great day and free! for teachers.

The weather has grown cool and lovely. I'm settling down with the little beasties and starting to learn some of their names. The teaching is really fun, although there is quite a range of proficiencies.

Today is a Red Letter Day as I FINALLY received my Alien Registration Certificate (Green Card) which makes me legal. It's green here, too.

Trash

Amazing, the blog is working. I have so much to say but the server has been down for weeks!

Anyway, all is well -- or sort of. I would really like it if we got paid sooner or later without a million excuses but supposedly it is on the way. In November I will be rich!

The topic for today will be trash. I have never been anywhere where they take it so seriously. Taiwan has the stated goal of being trash free by 2008. That means everything will be recyclable.

We have trash pickup every night. Ostensibly this keeps the rodent population down. The garbage truck plays a tune like the Good Humor man and everyone runs down to the designated corner to wait for the truck. The truck slows down (no, not stops) and everyone rushes up and throws their trash into the back while it is rolling. This stuff was previously defined to me as "wet trash". That seemed easy enough to differentiate from the recyclables that we already know: glass, cans, newspapers. Not true! Paper that has been used is not recyclable, some plastic bags are, some are not. If your guess wrong, the garbage man will refuse your trash. They can even fine you!

Two days each week (and every neighborhood know which ones they have) a second truck follows the first. This is the recycling truck. So, first you run to the garbage truck, throw your stuff in, then run back to the second truck and hand that bag up. It doesn't stop moving either but you can't toss it since there is probably glass in the bag. This becomes quite the neighborhood event. I've met lots of people this way, mostly because we have crashed into each other trying to get to the truck before it goes away.

We have lunch at school -- buffet style. Food isn't bad and it's very cheap. Everyone brings their own bowl, chopsticks and some sort of dish. When you are done, there are about 4 plastic disposal units. The first is for food (except bones), the second is for bones, the third is for napkins (used) and the fourth is for plastic if we have anything like pudding cups. It takes longer to dispose of your leavings than it does to eat! All of this is accomplished with much seriousness. They look at me oddly if I chuckle.

The food (without the bones) is sold to a neighboring farmer to be fed to animals. The bones go to a fertilizer plant where they are ground up and I have no idea where the paper and plastic go.

We are certainly doing our bit to make the 2008 goal.